[SOLVED] NFS share not visible to Kodi (or anything else)

My NFS share is not visible to any other device on the network and it's driving me mad trying to troubleshoot what might be wrong. I feel that there's something obvious that I'm missing but cannot see the wood for the trees, so to speak. I'm new(ish) to OMV, am a mid-level Linux user but am new to NFS.

I'm running OMV 3.0.98 on a Raspberry Pi 3, with an external USB hard drive and sharing folders successfully with SMB. I have just installed Kodi on a Pi 2 to use as a media server that I want to connect to the OMV/Pi3 NAS drive (where all the media files reside). I want to use NFS rather than SMB because of its (apparently) lower CPU overhead.

In the OMV GUI, I've created a shared folder (/media), enabled NFS and added the shared folder, initially with the default shared options of (rw,secure) and with read/write privileges. When editing the share in the NFS configuration panel, under the Shared folder box appears the following text: The location of the files to share. The share will be accessible at /export/

I'm therefore expecting that the share will be visible on 192.168.1.125/24 and have used this in the Kodi interface to find the shared files. It finds nothing. I've tried various versions of a potential URL such as 192.168.1.125/24/export/ and 192.168.1.125/export/ but the share remains invisible on the network to any of my devices.

After some online searching, I was advised to add a Kodi user to OMV and to change the share's options to subtree_check,insecure,all_squash,anonuid=1002,anongid=100 where anonuid is the guid of the Kodi user.

This has made no difference to the visibility of the share.

I am now going around in circles and making no meaningful progress in solving this problem. I'll be very grateful for some guidance on this. Again, I feel that there is something obvious that I am missing.

Thanks.

[Edit: SOLVED]

TL;dr Kodi on Arch Linux does not support NFS by default. Install libnfs on the arch linux box to fix this. When configuring the NFS share in OMV, make sure you enter the client IP address not the server IP address! Share options rw,subtree_check,insecure seem to work well for most users.

The post was edited 1 time, last by iF*73: Edited to include solution. (Mar 8th 2018, 6:27pm).

Alas, I still cannot connect and get the following error message when I try to add 192.168.1.125/export/movies as a new network location within the Kodi GUI:Unable to connect. The connection to the network couldn't be established. This could be due to the network not being connected. Would you like to add it anyway?

I have checked on the server (Pi3 running OMV) that the /export/movies directory exists, and it does (and contains multiple video files) so files are in the expected place. The NFS share has been created and yet I cannot connect to it.

What other diagnostics can I try? I cannot believe this is really as difficult as I am finding it to be.

My NFS share is not visible to any other device on the network and it's driving me mad trying to troubleshoot what might be wrong. I feel that there's something obvious that I'm missing but cannot see the wood for the trees, so to speak. I'm new(ish) to OMV, am a mid-level Linux user but am new to NFS.

I'm running OMV 3.0.98 on a Raspberry Pi 3, with an external USB hard drive and sharing folders successfully with SMB. I have just installed Kodi on a Pi 2 to use as a media server that I want to connect to the OMV/Pi3 NAS drive (where all the media files reside). I want to use NFS rather than SMB because of its (apparently) lower CPU overhead.

In the OMV GUI, I've created a shared folder (/media), enabled NFS and added the shared folder, initially with the default shared options of (rw,secure) and with read/write privileges. When editing the share in the NFS configuration panel, under the Shared folder box appears the following text: The location of the files to share. The share will be accessible at /export/

I'm therefore expecting that the share will be visible on 192.168.1.125/24 and have used this in the Kodi interface to find the shared files. It finds nothing. I've tried various versions of a potential URL such as 192.168.1.125/24/export/ and 192.168.1.125/export/ but the share remains invisible on the network to any of my devices.

After some online searching, I was advised to add a Kodi user to OMV and to change the share's options to subtree_check,insecure,all_squash,anonuid=1002,anongid=100 where anonuid is the guid of the Kodi user.

This has made no difference to the visibility of the share.

I am now going around in circles and making no meaningful progress in solving this problem. I'll be very grateful for some guidance on this. Again, I feel that there is something obvious that I am missing.

Thanks.

Changing "secure" in extra options to "insecure" did it for me. I am able to connect to the share from Kodi on everything from a CU-Boxi, Pi3, PC, Android, etc....

Thanks mikebetz42 and subzero79 for your suggestions. Neither of them have worked. I am now wondering whether the NFS share is even visible on the network and/or whether OMV is behaving correctly for me.

I have only ever used the OMV GUI to set up the NFS share and assumed that the necessary files, folders and permissions would be created as a consequence of this. Not so. For example, /export had not been created and only appeared after I issued exportfs -a from the CLI of the server.

I have made multiple NFS share configuration changes in the OMV GUI as I've tried to find the right combination of options to make the share visible to the Kodi client. The server's current output from exportfs -v is

I do not know why I seem to have two shares when the OMV GUI indicates that I only have one, and why are there so many options specified when I only have subtree_check,insecure specified in the GUI.

One is the share one is the pseudo rootfs, please read the wiki.
Those options are the ones reported by exportfs -v, the settings are in /etc/export, fsid is added to every nfs share by omv configuration backend

Why are you using network security? you should leave that out for testing now.

Also just check the service is running in the dashboard or with systemctl status nfs-kernel-server. If this is a rpi and you did not wait enough time for the first boot with internet (30 minutes) then i can see why are you having problems, specially with NFS

Thanks for your reply. You are right that I have never used NFS before and am only doing so in response to general advice about using NFS in preference to SMB in underpowered CPU devices like the RPi.

The OMV web panel (Services) indicates that NFS is enabled and running but I cannot connect to the server from any client, Kodi or otherwise. This is my ongoing problem for which I am seeking a solution.

Rpi images perform several tasks at first boot. One of them is installing a kernel that comes more with more modules than the default armbian, including nfsd.
Is the readme of where you download the images.

In you r case seems to be working, at least the dashboard shows running. Last test remove the network security in the share and try again.
If that didn’t work, then reflash the image and let the server run alone for at least 30 minutes with internet, then login and reconfigure again.

showmount -e 192.168.x.x generates error clnt_create: RPC: program not registered. I had struck that error previously when I was trying to see if the NFS shares were visible from a client. I chose not to go down another rabbit hole and instead I have spent the last few hours reflashing and reconfiguring OMV in an attempt to get NFS shares working. I have failed. The behaviour I see is exactly the same as previously: the Kodi client cannot see any of the NFS shares. However, SMB is working fine.

Despondent and defeated, I thought that DLNA might be an alternative way of sharing OMV content with Kodi, and one that should "just work" if the hype around UPnP is to be believed.

(I know this is off topic, but please bear with me)

I installed the minidlna plugin, set up the shares and connected two clients to the server: Kodi on the Arch Linux box and an Android app (Localcast) that can talk to UPnP servers.

Both clients can see the server but can see no content. The only folders visible are generic ones that contain no files. (Browse Folders, Music, Pictures, Video.)

This leads me to believe that there is something more fundamentally wrong in my OMV. Permissions maybe? I'm too close to it all right now to troubleshoot, but nothing obvious is sticking out at me. My setup is not complex. minidlna system user has read/write access to the media folders. Everything else looks fine, but the clients cannot see any media content.